1982: Chef and restaurateur Alice Waters in her restaurant, Chez Panisse, Berkeley, California. She traveled to Turkey, experiencing another food culture and an ancient tradition of hospitality, and then spent another year in France, deepening her knowledge of French gastronomy. Waters volunteered for the congressional campaign of antiwar journalist Robert Scheer, and surrounded herself with a circle of like-minded friends, preparing communal meals for political meetings that lasted long into the night.Īfter graduating from Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies, she trained at the International Montessori School in London, intrigued by the Montessori method of childhood education, which emphasizes hands-on experience of practical activities. (Susan Wood)Īfter a year, she returned to Berkeley and found the campus and surrounding community more convulsed than ever by resistance to America’s military involvement in Vietnam. 1982: Alice Waters with Chez Panisse chefs and staff in front of the restaurant in Berkeley, California. In later years, Waters recalled her experience in France as a great awakening of the senses and an expanded consciousness of the value of dining as a communal experience. While Americans bought their bread and baked goods sealed in plastic, the French more often bought theirs fresh from the oven of a neighborhood bakery. In France, Waters found, more people shopped at farmers’ markets, buying produce in season from the farmers themselves, with close attention to the source and quality of everything they ate. The nation’s diet was increasingly dominated by processed foods, transported over great distances and preserved by freezing and canning, or with chemical additives. In the 1950s and ‘60s, more and more Americans shopped at supermarkets or grabbed food on the run from fast food establishments. In the United States, the growth of suburban communities and interstate highways had separated most people from the source of the food they ate. In 1971, Alice Waters, at the age of twenty-seven, and UC Berkeley comparative literature professor Paul Aratow open their pioneering restaurant, Chez Panisse, in an arts and crafts house along Shattuck Avenue, in Berkeley. She lived at the bottom of a market street where she was enchanted by the fresh seasonal produce for sale and the custom of buying fresh ingredients daily. In France, Waters found that her fascination with things French extended beyond history to the food culture and cuisine of contemporary France. As part of her program, she had the opportunity to study for a year in France, and at age 19, she packed her bags for Paris. Waters was studying French history and culture with particular emphasis on the tumultuous century encompassing the French Revolution and its aftermath. Waters graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1967 with a degree in French cultural studies before training at the International Montessori School in London. 1969: Alice Waters teaching at a Montessori school. The Berkeley campus and the surrounding San Francisco Bay Area became a center of resistance to what many saw as the oppressive conformity of the previous decade. Berkeley students eventually won the right of free political expression on campus, allowing more students to question the political consensus of the Cold War era. Waters was inspired by the movement, particularly by the impassioned oratory of one of the movement’s leaders, graduate student Mario Savio. Students who had participated in the Civil Rights Movement’s “Freedom Summer,” registering African American voters in the Deep South, fought efforts by the campus police to enforce the ban met with civil disobedience by Berkeley students, and mass arrests. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement arose in response to the university’s ban on campus political activity by groups other than the two national political parties. She enrolled in the University of California at Santa Barbara, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, arriving in 1964, just as the campus was rocked by the first of the era’s student-led protest movements. Her mother was interested in making healthy food choices for her family and limiting her children’s sugar intake, but by her own account, the young Alice was a picky eater, who took no great interest in where her food came from or how it was produced. Her father, Charles, worked as a management consultant while her mother, Margaret, worked at home. (© Alice Waters)Īlice Waters was born in Chatham, New Jersey, the second of four sisters. Ap1950s: Alice Waters dressed in a cowboy outfit with her three sisters at Christmas in New Jersey.
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